


The Care and Keeping of Normalcy

by RecessiveJean



Category: D.E.B.S. (2004)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Exchange of gunfire in an unrobbed museum in the presence of an intentionally acquired baby, F/F, For some people, Intentional Baby Acquisition, Normal Life, Not-robbing of museums
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 13:00:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17044217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RecessiveJean/pseuds/RecessiveJean
Summary: Even the most sincere efforts at leading an ordinary life can suffer, on occasion, an awkward intrusion of the violently extraordinary.Lucy and Amy adapt.





	The Care and Keeping of Normalcy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [handhellbasket](https://archiveofourown.org/users/handhellbasket/gifts).



They had left the gunfire behind. That was the plan. At least, it was what the plan had been supposed to be.

Lucy, in hindsight, had to acknowledge there had never really been a plan. Not one they’d written down or made official, anyway. Mostly there had been a hazy smattering of pillow talk, muted by the sultry heat of Barcelona summer nights. The stars had been sublime, Amy had tasted like carmelized sugar and Lucy had been completely transported.

If the things they whispered were more dream than detailed, they were neither of them in any fit state to mind.

Even as she started making contacts and Amy’s studies had advanced as far as they were able in that region, it had never been entirely worked out between them, the end goal of it all. They had been too happy to just let it carry them along. She had definitely turned around from the stove one day to say “I think I might go into business,” and Amy, thunking her bag down by the door, scraping at a blotch of paint on the corner of her jaw, had nodded with aimless enthusiasm.

“Oh sure,” she’d said, “you’d be good at that.”

The unquestioning support had given Lucy a warm, fuzzy flutter somewhere high in her chest. The exact nature and purpose of the business had not even been discussed, and it wasn’t until Amy had needed to transfer her credits Stateside again to finish her second degree that Lucy had even made an effort to rein in what had turned into a pretty sprawling network of vaguely-termed “business contacts,” which effort itself had quickly been set aside in favor of wedding plans.

Their wedding had certainly been chaotic, but it wasn’t the kind of chaos that came with gunfire. It was a misplaced flower order and a few too many chicken meals coupled with a shortage of vegetarian options (although that, admittedly, had _almost_ led to gunfire, which Lucy thought surprising, coming from vegetarians) and even the sporadic mess of it had been comfortingly normal. And it had ended with them married, to each other, which was surely the best and most desired outcome of just about any wedding, so it felt like the plan-that-wasn’t was coming along nicely.

So somehow, under it all, she thought they’d had a common understanding. Whatever it was they decided to do—and that, at least, was never set in stone—it would need to be of the _not_ -what-they-used-to-do variety. That meant Amy could take up gardening or banking or water polo, if she liked, but she would never file an application of interest with the CIA. And Lucy would be free to restore old cars, run an antique store or teach a spin class, but she was not to start casing banks again, unless of course Amy worked in one and Lucy was waiting for the best time to ask her out to lunch.

None of this was actually discussed, but Lucy was pretty sure it was understood, not only by them but also by their friends.

Which made the situation they found themselves in that Saturday afternoon _entirely_ Scud and Janet’s fault. She was sure of it.

“I can’t believe those two,” Lucy fumed.

She crouched behind the wide marble support column of the museum atrium. Though her eyes were fixed on Amy and the priceless object she held, her attention was still largely held by the distant pops of gunfire that echoed from the other side.

The room distorted the sound so that the whinge and whine all around them might have been mistaken for errant summer hornets, were it not for the accompanying chips and scrapes eked out of the sides of the column.

“Is it their fault, though? Really?” Amy adjusted her elbows, awkwardly levering the bundle into a better position against her shoulder. “You know, this is a lot harder than it looks.”

Lucy fixated on the first part of Amy’s remark to the exclusion of the rest.

“What do you—of course it’s their fault! We weren’t even supposed to _be_ here today, so you can’t tell me this is about us. We’re normal now, remember?”

She interrupted her own sentence to arch around the width of the column, return fire with grim intention, and then duck back into the meager safety of its shelter once more.

“Very normal.”

There was no danger of rebuttal from the party opposite. Amy was now entirely focused on the bundle she held. It was beginning to stir, despite her best efforts to maintain an aura of calm.

“Oh, no. Shh. Shhhh. Wilma, _no_.”

Lucy’s expression morphed rapidly from irritation at their position under siege to true panic.

“Is she waking up? Amy!”

“I told you!” Amy jostled the soft, clinging lump of limbs and thinly-fuzzed pink head from one arm to the other. “This is a _lot_ harder than it looks! She was asleep, but now—oh no, Wilma, _please_.”

Wilma, now wholly committed to her operatic solo, would not be deterred. Her thin, new voice rose with gusto through the gunfire, over the ping of bullets, to soar majestically into the heights of the atrium.

The works of the great masters looked on in silence, no doubt suitably impressed to have such an accomplished amateur vocalist in their midst.

Amy, bracing a hand against the wall behind her, pushed herself up from the crouch she had been holding. Lucy ducked back from her most recent volley of return fire just in time to see Amy reach her full height, and promptly joined her.

“What are you doing? Sit down!”

“She needs to be walked.”

“You cannot walk her, we’re in a gunfight!”

“Well, she doesn’t know that! And I promised Janet we’d stick to the nap schedule.”

“If Janet was that concerned about the nap schedule, you think she’d have mentioned the kidnap risk.”

“You don’t _know_ that they’re after Wilma. It could just be a coincidence that they showed up when we did.”

“People do not coincidentally attack normal wives holding a baby in a museum,” Lucy said virtuously. “That’s the kind of thing you do to the babies of spies and thieves. Which we are _not_.”

“But we were,” Amy reasoned. She was shifting from one foot to the other, creating an awkward, bumpy rhythm in an effort to find something that would soothe Wilma. “And it wasn’t very long ago. Maybe not everybody knows we’re different. You know. From before.”

“You mean that we’re normal, now,” Lucy agreed. She leaned out to return fire again, so missed Amy’s quiet sigh, but she was back in time to see the look on her face.

“What? What is it?” She surveyed the warbling infant with suspicion, then alarm. “Oh, no. Did she . . ?”

“No!” Amy shook her head vehemently. “And I don’t see how she even could, again. That would be three times in an hour. She’d have to be sick to go more than that. Wouldn’t she?” A note of doubt crept in, and she stole a glance at her warbling charge. “I mean, no. She’s fine. But I wish you wouldn’t keep saying _that_ about us all the time.”

“Saying what?”

Amy scrunched up her lip.

“That we’re . . . you know. Normal.”

Lucy’s surprise was such that she actually lowered both guns.

“Why?”

Amy struggled to put her desires into a shape sufficiently defined to speak aloud.

“I guess it just feels a little final when you say it like that. Like now we’re all done, there’s nothing else for us to do but just  . . . _be_. Which is great!” she hastened to add, seeing the less desirable direction her complaint could be headed, if she didn’t make an effort to head it off. “I like being with you. Just being.”

And she smiled, then, pink and happy, so transparently sincere, that Lucy smiled back, giddy with the rush of there still being a _them_ even now, so unexpected and perfect that the sight of Amy smiling still made her hands tremble and her knees wobble and her heart gallop.

Also, possibly, some collection of those symptoms were a side effect of the adrenaline from the gunfight. But Amy’s smile was certainly not innocent of blame.

“I like it too,” she said softly.

A bullet bit into the wall inches from Amy’s left elbow, and Lucy promptly flung both her arms around the column, fired indiscriminately until she heard a thud echo across the floor, then drew her hands back.

The return fire continued, but more cautiously now. Lucy, one gun now empty, made a noise of disgust and nodded at the prone form of a museum security guard just off to the side.

“Does he have another?”

Amy, cradling baby Wilma against her neck, crouched as low as she could and extended a cautious hand to pat around the guard’s belt. She found what she sought and tossed it to Lucy, who checked and loaded it with the kind of absent-minded air that she also bound her hair up with a spare elastic when it was getting in her way.

Amy, settling on the floor again, smiled fondly at the sight.

“There,” she said impulsively, “that. That . . . kind of thing. That you just did, there. I love it. You being so good at that without even looking like it’s difficult. Because you are! But that’s not normal, is it?”

Lucy stiffened self-consciously.

“Well, I already knew how to—”

“No, no, I know you did. We both did, right? Before we met. When we thought we knew who we were and what we wanted. That’s the kind of thing we were good at. And you can’t just forget all that in a year or two, or unlearn it, or even really unbecome it. It’s still who we _are_ , don’t you see?”

Lucy looked at her like maybe she did, a little.

“Are you . . . I mean, are you saying . . . do you _want_ to go back? To that?”

Amy shook her head quickly.

“No. I like what we’re doing now. Your consulting firm is already doing stupidly well, and I love everything about the university here. My classes, my teaching . . . I don’t even mind that we didn’t stay in Spain. It was stupidly hot there in the summer, for one thing, and anyway I think it’s better to be here, so we can see  . . . well, things like this.” She smiled fondly down at Wilma, who had paused her performance to scrub one small, fat fist against her face, irritably.

“I could hardly believe it when Janet told me.”

“I told Scud he should be shot,” Lucy agreed fondly. “He’s the last person who should have made a kid. He can’t even make his own bed.”

“But he made a pretty good one.” Amy adjusted her arms, resigned to the look of stubborn misery that returned to Wilma’s face as she filled her lungs and resumed her arias. “If a little loud.”

“So normal isn’t _bad_ ,” Lucy reflected, making her way to the conclusion of Amy’s reflections, “but you don’t like me to talk about it?”

Amy shook her head.

“No. I don’t like you treating it like it’s our destination. Because maybe, someday,” she jostled Wilma absently, capably, and startled the infant into something almost like comfort and the silence that accompanied it, “I’ll want a detour.”

She nuzzled the scrunchy face of her friend’s baby while Lucy assessed both her admission and their surroundings. After a moment’s prolonged lull, she gently prompted her wife for a response.

“What do you think?”

“I think we need a mirror,” Lucy decided. “And the screen of my phone cracked when I hit the floor back there, so it’s going to have to be yours.”

Amy knew better than to interpret this as an avoidance tactic. She simply fished her phone out of the pocket of Wilma’s diaper bag, and lobbed it to her wife.

Lucy fiddled with the settings a moment before she extended it, cautiously, to the very edge of the coverage offered by the column.

“They’re staying down,” she groused. “I swear, you wing two or three of them and all of a sudden the rest are good for nothing.”

“You need me to draw them out?” Amy asked calmly.

“What? No!” Lucy looked at her in horror. “You can’t! You have—”

Amy joined Lucy behind the column to nestle the now-settled Wilma in the crook of Lucy’s arm, relieving her of the gun she held in that hand.

“Got her? There. All cozy.” She tweaked the folds of the baby’s sweater and smiled. “Look at you, having fun with Aunt Lucy.”

Aunt Lucy, newly christened in that role, looked more like she was having six fits than any fun at all, but did not actually contradict her wife. Amy dropped a kiss on the baby’s nose and Lucy’s mouth, checked the gun with a facility fully equal to Lucy’s own, and fell back a few steps.

She considered her options on either side of the column, then indicated the path Lucy herself would have chosen: the way to Lucy’s right, though more immediately exposed, also gave on to a wide hallway with plenty of cover on the near side in the form of various freestanding displays.

She arched an eyebrow, seeking verification, but Lucy did not immediately give it.

Instead she hesitated.

Wilma, in her arm, was soft and heavy and warm. Amy, facing her, was alive and smiling—smiling!—and ready to do something really ridiculously dangerous and very _not_ normal and . . . this was not what Lucy had thought she promised, when they agreed their lives would be shared.

And most terrifyingly of all, that . . . didn’t really feel like a problem.

So Lucy hesitated, and Amy waited. Patient, understanding, half a clip still in her gun and looking very little like a Master’s student of Art History with the solemn responsibility of teaching her own class and a lot more like the spy she had chosen never to become.

She looked incredible, and Lucy, with the same rush of awe and disbelief that she felt every morning, marveled that this woman had chosen _her_.

So she smiled, and Amy smiled back.

Then she ran.

Even as Amy moved, Lucy moved too. Her hand flicked up, out, and guided the phone in a purposeful track along the far wall. She picked out the three remaining shooters as they rose to shoot at her wife, and then, careful to clutch Wilma safely in the protective shadow of the column, because Lucy was not a _completely_ irresponsible babysitter, she leaned out and picked them off one after the other.

They hit the floor at about the same time as Amy reached the shelter of the open hallway, and the two poised in their respective hiding places, breathing hard, waiting . . .

“Is that everyone?”

Amy’s question was the only sound in the atrium. Lucy looked down, and discovered Wilma had fallen asleep. Apparently the percussive beat of gunfire had taken on a soothing quality, after a time.

“Trust Janet’s weird kid,” she said fondly, then raised her voice to answer. “Yeah, that’s all of them.”

Amy eased out from behind a heavy granite sculpture and stepped back into the atrium. Lucy snuggled Wilma closer and emerged from the shadow of the column to join her.

“What’s going to bother me,” Amy began, “is that we still don’t know exactly why—”

“Hands up, both of you.”

Lucy and Amy both whirled to face the undetected newcomer, a stocky man in dusty clothes who had clearly just picked himself up from his place on the rubble strewn, limedust-sprinkled floor to aim his weapon at Lucy.

Lucy, for infantile reasons, did not obey the command. Amy, for infantile and marital reasons, did.

“Put the gun down,” he ordered Amy. At that she did hesitate. He jerked the muzzle of the gun illustratively in the direction of Lucy and Wilma, which settled her indecision nicely. She placed the gun on the floor, then straightened, slowly, considering the dust-covered figure.

“I thought you hit him,” she frowned.

“No,” Lucy tracked back mentally to the initial volley of shots that had cleared all visitors from the vicinity. First a man and woman had flanked them and attempted to wrest the baby from her stroller; Amy had won that round, with the assistance of the guard who had been felled shortly after, and set to knocking the first two out of commission as the others converged on them and Lucy urged the wisdom of sheltering behind the column. “You did. With the stroller.”

“Not hard enough, then,” Amy scowled. She focused on him with an intensity that made no secret of her desire to finish the job properly. “What do you want with us, anyway?”

“You?” He shook his head, confused. “I don’t want you. We want the baby. Her mother oversees all security features for the power grid of the entire Northeastern United States. Do you have any idea what we could do with access to that?”

Lucy quivered with belated triumph.

“You see? You see?” Lucy she went to her toes a little, deeply gratified. “Wilma! They want Wilma. Not us, because _we_ are _normal._ ”

The man keeping his gun trained on her looked like he might want to disagree. Amy, though, smiled fondly at her wife and inclined her head. Lucy warmed at the sight.

The drawing back of the hammer refocused them both. Lucy snugged her arm around the sleeping baby, clearly resolved that Janet’s weird kid wasn’t going anywhere with this guy. Amy, hands still elevated, empty, eyed the gun that lay temptingly at her feet.

“Now,” the man was moving forward, empty hand extended, gun trained on Lucy, “you are going to give me the baby, and I won’t have to—”

Anything.

He did not have to do anything at all.

He did not have to do a thing, because the steely cough of a suppressed shot split the thick silence of the atrium. A tidy hole opened up the center of his forehead and he dropped, unprotesting, to reveal Janet standing behind him, eyes wide, mouth tight, gun still rock-steady in her hands.

He threw up a small cloud of dust when he landed, but after that, nothing. Janet still watched him, carefully, cautiously, until Amy was able to collect her own gun, kick his well beyond his reach, and verify that he would not be reaching for anything, not his gun or Janet’s baby, ever again.

“Gone,” she said, and Janet lowered her own gun, still trembling.

Lucy jiggled Wilma, now beginning to stir, and grinned.

“See that? That’s your mom. And she’s one hell of a shot.”

Janet was not in the mood to receive a compliment. She looked from Amy to the body to Lucy to her baby, then back to Amy again.

“Oh my god,” she said. Then, with emphasis, “oh my _God_.”

“She’s fine, Janet, she’s fine, see?” Amy soothed, beckoning Lucy over. “I am sorry, I am _so_ sorry, but I wish you’d told us this was going to be a risk. We’d never have taken her out if we’d known.”

“You think _I_ knew?” Janet squeaked, accepting her baby and poking fretfully at every fold and crease of her clothing, checking for blood that was not there to find. “I didn’t know! I wouldn’t have left her if I’d known. And then when Ms. Petrie made a point of getting in touch to tell me _this_ was going on, and said reports indicated it was _you_ two, I knew it had to be Wilma, too, so I came right away.”

“Right away?” Lucy asked skeptically.

Janet flushed.

“Well, I had to find my gun, first.”

Amy tucked her smile behind the palm of her hand. Janet bristled.

“You don’t get it, there are just _so_ many places! Especially now that I lock it up, because I _am_ a responsible mother.”

“Of course you are,” Amy soothed, steering Janet toward the back of the museum, and the less-observed exit, where throngs of police and reporters and gawking onlookers did not lie in wait. “Wilma is such a lucky little girl. And we were so glad to look after her, too, kidnapping attempt or not.”

“Though maybe, next time,” Lucy put in, falling into step with them both, “you check to see what’s up? Because this was quite an afternoon, given we’re, you know. Normal and all, now.”

Then she caught sight of Amy’s smile, wry and warm, and she smiled awkwardly, acknowledgingly, in response.

“Well. Normal enough.”

Amy’s smile widened, and she settled her cheek on Lucy’s shoulder.

“At least,” she murmured, “close enough to count.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for the chance to write these two! I loved your idea that they would not quite manage to leave it all behind. I think you're right, and I hope this looks something like you had imagined it might for them.
> 
> Happy Yuletide!


End file.
